Search Results for A voice for men

Brother JohntheOther Mansplains it All For You: Rebecca Watson misrepresentation edition.

Blabbity blabbity blab.

Check out this post from PZ Myers, tearing apart a sleazy JohntheOther video about Rebecca Watson. In the video, JtO, the number two man at A Voice for Men, declared Watson a sociopath for allegedly mistreating a “handler” assigned to her at a Skepticon convention.

Trouble is, Watson’s “mistreatment” never actually happened, and her public recounting of her (wholly imaginary) selfish behavior was part of a good-natured prank, with the humor directed not at her handler but at herself and the conference organizer. The handler was of course in on the joke. It would seem that JtO either misunderstood the joke, or simply decided to misrepresent what happened in order to make Watson look like a sociopath.

Are there any truly honest MRAs out there? At this point I cannot think of a single one.

JtO, evidently stung by the criticism, has made the video in question private. And he’s made another video responding to the criticism from Myers, Watson, and the handler from the convention itself.

In the video, he offers his own explanation for why he missed the obvious fact that Watson was making a joke: he claims he didn’t actually watch enough of the original Rebecca Watson video to get to the punchline of her joke before making his diagnoses of her. That might seem to reflect poorly on JtO’s research skills. But he’s not overly troubled by this, evidently. “My bad,” he says, cheerfully.

But he still thinks she’s a sociopath, and argues that the criticism he’s gotten doesn’t stem from his complete misrepresentation of Watson’s joke, but because he’s “struck a nerve.” Then he babbles on about various other crap including Jessica Valenti and weapons of mass destruction and, well, I wasn’t really paying much attention at that point. He ends by calling PZ Myers “Sunshine.”

Here’s that video. I watched the whole fucking 11 minutes and 11 seconds of it. I wouldn’t really recommend that to anyone. You only have to watch about 11 seconds of it to conclude, correctly, that JtO is an ass.

MRAs: The way to defeat feminism is not through debate but by “inflicting … pain” on feminists.

Men's Rights "Activism"

What can you do when you realize that you’re losing the war of ideas? You can rethink some or all of your ideas, seriously considering the unnerving possibility that you might be, well, wrong. You can reconsider how you present your ideas.

Or you can give up on ideas entirely, and attempt to pressure or harass or even terrorize others into some form of surrender. That’s what the the uber-radical Weathermen did in the 1960s and 70s, turning first to violent direct action in the aptly named “days of rage” and then to bombs when the revolution that many in the New Left had been prophesying failed to materialize. That’s what the anti-abortion movement has been doing for decades now, with some in the movement harassing women trying to get abortions while more radical antis bomb clinics and kill doctors. .

And now we’re seeing rhetoric from Men’s Rights Activists that suggests some in that movement may also be giving up on talk. Consider A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam, who declared in a fundraising letter a couple of months back that:

Progress for men will not be gained by debate, reason or typical channels of grievance available to segments of the population that the world actually gives a damn about. The progress we need will only be realized by inflicting enough pain on the agents of hate, in public view, that it literally shocks society out of its current coma.

Elam is – presumably deliberately — vague about what exactly he means when he talks about “inflicting … pain,” and as far as I know he has never explicitly endorsed violence. But he has spoken openly about “stalking” individual feminists and otherwise “fucking their shit up” by, among other things, posting personal information about them on the AVfM-sponsored site Register-Her.com for all would be vigilantes to see. And in the “activism” section of his website he has reprinted a manifesto explicitly calling for the firebombing of courthouses and police stations.

Elam isn’t the only MRA who has officially given up on “debate and reason” in favor of “inflicting … pain” on feminists. The “counter-feminist” wannabe philosopher who calls himself Fidelbogen makes a similar argument in a recent post on his blog:

Feminism is your enemy, and the obligation to treat feminists as fellow human beings is officially waived. They are not fellow human beings, they are ALIENS.

Dehumanizing the enemy always a good start.

[L]et’s not hear any crap about so-called “hate speech”. You see, there is simply no way that you can resist evil, denounce tyranny, or call pernicious things by their right names, without crossing a fine line into “hate speech” or something very like it. Extremism against a bully is no vice, and since bullies have their own moral economy, you are entitled to pay them in their own coin.

It’s not hate speech if you really do hate them?

The important thing to understand about the feminists is, that they will not change their outward behavior unless social heat and pressure are inflicted upon them.

Fidelbogen, a sometime contributor to A Voice for Men, is also vague about what exactly he means by this “social heat and pressure.” He continues:

What, do you think they will stop what they are doing just because somebody intellectually convinces them they are mistaken? They will do no such thing, because they are people with an agenda who know they are “right”, and they lack the gift to see themselves as the rest of the world sees them.

IRONY ALERT. IRONY ALERT.

Over on Reddit, meanwhile, the charming JeremiahMRA – who used to post comments here as Things Are Bad – thinks the “inflict pain” policy should be extended to all women, any time they engage in “bad behavior.” Responding to a poster asking how to handle a disagreement with his mother, he explained his theory in (sometimes redundant) detail, receiving several dozen net upvotes for his post:

The ONLY way you change women’s bad behavior is by punishing them if they won’t start acting like adults. …

The only way you change a woman’s bad behavior is by making sure they know it hurts them. …

Reasoning with her will not work. The only answer is to use the power he has as her SON to threaten to hurt her emotionally. Women are emotional creatures. Nothing else will work. This is what it means to be a man: you do what you have to do so that things will be better in the end, even if you don’t like it. …

It isn’t about convincing her what’s right, it’s about showing her she will suffer if she doesn’t do what’s right. That is the only thing that will work.

The Men’s Rights Movement likes to pretend that is it a civil rights movement. But threats, harassment, hate speech, and emotional blackmail aren’t the tactics of a legitimate civil rights movement. These are the tactics of angry narcissists clinging to retrograde prejudices, who have given up on the war of ideas because on some level they know that history is against them, and that they will never win.

MRAs: Most inept propagandists ever?

Someone posted this image in the comments at A Voice for Men. As far as I can figure it, it depicts brave MRAs pulling down the allegedly evil Violence Against Women Act, which for some reason is represented by the Venus of Willendorf. Because women are fat? Or is just feminists who are fat? Or battered women?

Is every supposed MRA cause really just an excuse to talk shit about women?

 

Are dog bitches superior to human bitches? A misogynist dingbat says yes.

Bitch, please.

At some point, you’ve probably all heard some douchebag offer some version of the following bit of misogynist humor: You shouldn’t call a woman a bitch because that’s an insult … to female dogs!

A traditionalist Christian named Walter Allen Thompson has expanded this dumb joke into an even dumber essay. And he seems to literally believe it. As he explains in the essay, which has been posted on the Very Dumb Government blog (and which I ran across thanks to a link from our pal MarkyMark):

[W]hen some of you call a woman a “bitch” think about what you are saying.  The word “bitch” means a female dog.  So if you are going to use the word with its true meaning, you would actually be insulting female dogs, because the dogs have better behavior than many women. … I would never insult my dog by calling Gloria Allred a “bitch”.  … I would call her a feminist but not a bitch.  The feminist movement has made many of our women unseemly wenches. 

Walter clearly holds a much higher opinion of his dog:

I love my bitch and I don’t want to say anything to offend her.  My bitch is sweet, my bitch is lovable, my bitch is kind, my bitch is considerate, and she hardly causes me any trouble. 

And, and as we all know, ladies is trouble:

A dog will give a man unconditional love; whereas, a woman may or may not keep you around depending upon the prevailing winds.  I don’t have to buy my dog a food dish lined with jewels…. My dog doesn’t run up a charge account at Macy’s, and she doesn’t spend $50.00 to do her nails.  My dog doesn’t take drugs, drink alcohol, or crash my brand new car. 

I don’t know from dogs, but if my cat were actually capable of any of these things, she would do them. That’s part of the charm of cats. They’re tiny little monsters – selfish, self-absorbed, amoral creatures we let into our homes because they’re cute, they’re fascinating, and they’re too small to kill us. Not that mine doesn’t try.

I wouldn’t put up with that from a human being, but I put up with it from my cat because she’s a cat, and had a rough childhood (she was abandoned) and doesn’t know any better. Generally speaking, people expect different things from their pets than from their romantic partners.

Well, not this guy:

All my dog needs is a little love, attention, and her food.  Overall, the quality of life with my dog has far exceeded any relationship I have had with any woman.  The value of any relationship depends upon unconditional love, and that’s more evident with my dog.

“Unconditional love” sounds nice in theory, but in practice as most of us know it’s really a pretty shitty idea. If someone behaves in a way that is unlovable – attacks you, deliberately poops on the couch, starts reading A Voice for Men — you’re not obligated to keep loving them. Loyalty is, by and large, a good thing, and most of us are willing to cut those we love a lot of slack, but no one should be expected to put up with intolerable behavior in the name of unconditional love. (Also, people sometimes fall out of love. I know, shocking.)

People demand a bit more from their loved ones than dogs do, and that’s a good thing. Also, people know things that dogs don’t, and that’s also good. Hitler’s dog loved him. But then again Hitler’s dog didn’t know he was Hitler. (Hitler returned this unconditional love by having poor Blondi killed just before he killed himself.)

Of course, our boy Walter knows that most love is not unconditional. Indeed, as we saw above, he’s got a long list of conditions — some reasonable, some not — that women will have to meet before he’ll be willing to even consider them over his dog. Here are some more of his conditions, which his dog fulfills but most women (in his mind) won’t:

She doesn’t mess with my mind; doesn’t say.  She doesn’t tell me she loves me today, but tomorrow she wants a divorce. My dog doesn’t pole dance at drunken parties. My dog doesn’t pick up “stud muffins” at bars. My dog doesn’t make porno films. My dog doesn’t take me to court (you lawyers..don’t get any ideas) and she doesn’t make any unreasonable demands.  It is a perfect relationship as I don’t have to entertain any of her relatives.  My dog is my friend and not my adversary.

It’s a pretty revealing list. He’s upset not only by infidelity, but also by women changing their mind about things – “say[ing] yes today and no tomorrow.” (Saying “no” to what? Sex? Does he think he deserves the right to rape his wife?) His idea of a “perfect relationship” seems to be one in which he doesn’t have to deal with a woman’s wants, or desires, or even her relatives.

Walter rails against feminists and feminism, but it’s clear that he also has issues with traditional women actually expecting him to fulfill his role in a traditional male-breadwinner marriage.

If you want to know where you stand with a woman, just run out of money.  If you have a woman that stays with you when you’re broke or in a setback, then you have a good one.

Here’s a hint: if you don’t want a woman to expect you to provide for her, don’t marry a woman who expects you to provide for her.

Also: try not feeding your dog for several days, and see how lovable she is after that. (Given the strange literal mindedness of so many misogynists, I should add: don’t literally do that. Just imagine doing it, in your head.)

If I was ever to consider getting married again, the woman would have to (at the very least)  rise to the level of the behavior of my beautiful little dog.  Dogs and animals stay within the natural order in which God created; many people do not.

No, that’s ok. Stick to dogs for now.

EDITED TO ADD: As Molly Ren points out in the comments, it turns out that some dogs do pole dance. Heck, some even lick the stripper pole, like Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. (Well, not exactly like Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls.)

Breaking News from Imaginary Backwards Land: Atheists “worship at the altar of feminism.”

The Scumbag Privilege Denying r/Atheism meme.

Paul Elam has apparently become something of a comedian – though not on purpose. In his latest post on A Voice for Men, he takes on the atheist community for being too in thrall to (wait for it) feminism.

I’ll let him explain:

[T]hey are too religious. Yes, I mean that literally. For when you wipe away all the bombastic bellowing about empiricism and the strident mocking of those who choose a life of faith, what you are left with is a population of people that surrender their reason and cognition as though they were at gunpoint; that hit their knees as fast as any Catholic…to worship at the altar of feminism.

His proof? Several years ago someone at Atheist Nexus posted a link to a Men’s News Daily column of his, and – get this! – some feminists responded!

You can go here to see all the horrible things these evil cultish feminist atheists said. Like, for example:

I guess I’m a feminist, but I really like men and these are some of the things I love about them:

Protectiveness is a positive trait in men that women who want to have babies look for. We also like passion and some recklessness, but you won’t get me to admit that to my daredevil husband…..

Confidence; men usually have more of it and it is mostly a postive trait.

The ability to make decisions quickly.

Physical strength and endurance are helpful in many family situations. Ahem.

Penises. You have them, lots of us like them. I know it’s not technically a “trait”, but I had to put that in.

You can practically taste the man-hate there!

Elam, I should note, ignores that comment. No, what’s got his underpants in a wad is this comment:

The whole web site mensnewsdaily.com is a sad overreaction to the growing equality of women in society.

Evidently he’s been stewing about this remark for more than two years.

In fact, if you go and take a look at it, the discussion on Atheist Nexus wasn’t … really … all that feminist.  Yes, several people criticized Elam and mensnewsdaily as “extreme,” but one of those people also criticized radical feminists as similarly “extreme.” Some of the commenters explicitly identified themselves as feminist; others explicitly criticized feminism. Nonetheless, the discussion somehow managed to be the politest conversation about gender I’ve run across online in a long, long time.

Seriously. Go take a look at it. Then consider how Elam sums it all up:

Apparently they can’t even handle 50 years of loud mouthed arts majors without drinking the Kool-aide and going brain dead. There was scarcely a voice among them that did not wallow in the ersatz enlightenment so common to feminist ideologues.

And then he moves on to whatever this is:

Feminism, as far as ideology goes, has been very effective at using human reproductive realities to co-opt other movements. In fact, from the American Civil Rights Movement to Occupy Wall Street, feminism has progressed without paying its own way, but rather by sending women in to other social arenas and wheedling men into supporting them. The Borg would be proud if they had emotions. Resistance is Futrelle.

Ho ho! Futrelle rhymes with futile! Sort of! Lest Elam and co. become too overwhelmed with pride for this clever wordplay, I should note that some junior high schoolers beat him to the punch back in the late 70s. Or maybe it was grade schoolers. I really don’t remember.

I’m less clear about the rest of his argument about “human reproductive realities.” Apparently it’s a fancy way of saying that dudes only support feminism so they can get laid. Another highly original notion.

Elam’s other piece of evidence that feminism has taken over the atheist community? PZ Myers.

He quotes this evil athio-feminazi ideologue arguing that if male atheists want to get more women involved in the atheist community, they should:

Learn to shut up and listen. Seriously. You want women to find your organization pleasant and interesting and worth contributing to? Then don’t form panels full of men trying to figure out what women want, talking over women who try to get a word in edgewise, belittling women’s suggestions with jokes, and trying to determine how We Well-Meaning Men can give Those Women what we think they want. You are assuming an authority and presuming that it is in your power to give it to the minority, when what you should be doing is deferring to that minority and giving them your attention, letting them speak and shape your organization.

God – or, if you prefer, Imaginary Entity – forbid that male atheists actually listen to women explain why they might feel unwelcome in the mostly male (and not particularly feminist friendly) atheist community.

You really think feminism has taken over the atheist community? Take a look at Reddit’s Atheism subreddit, where, recently, a woman who recently described how she had been raped was attacked as a liar and a slut in a thread filled with rape jokes. Or go back a little further to the Elevatorgate brouhaha, where an atheist blogger who politely mentioned in a podcast that she doesn’t really like being hit on by strange men in elevators at 4 AM drew the ire of countless angry atheist dudes, including Richard Fucking Dawkins himself? (In case you want to revisit that bit of nastiness, I wrote about “Elevatorgate” in several blog posts; here are some reactions from decidedly non-feminist atheists.)

This is a movement that “worship[s] at the altar of feminism[?]” Not really seeing it, dude.

But again, congrats on the whole Futrelle/futile thing. Genius!

“The dried-up vagina is a tool of the state, and population control.”

Marriage: Not an effective form of birth control.

When we first met Spearhead commenter Rmaxd, he was raving about how our technological society had rendered women obsolete. He’s back, this time taking on, well, women again, and welfare, and declining birth rates, and, well, it’s all a little bit hard to follow.

Let’s start with Rmaxd’s basic premises:

Women are serially monogamous or hypergamous & are infertile for the majority of their lives

While men are polygamous, & FERTILE for the majority of their lives

Marriage has always been used as the earliest form of birth contraception, limit the amount of children a fertile male can have, by forced mating with a single infertile woman for the rest of his life.

We are off to a bad start here. Is there anything in all that that’s correct? Among other things: marriage is most decidedly not a particularly effective form of birth control. (The show Eight is Enough was based on a real family, and I suspect we’ve all met people with enough siblings to fill a bus.) But let’s continue; Rmaxd is on a roll:

As the government can no longer force this sort of mating on infertile womens, especially in the lower moronic, under educated peasantry states,

As women want alphas,

Obviously sluts & whores, are simply mimicing infertile women, as only infertile dried up vaginas, can afford to sleep around with hundreds of men

This is why we have sluts & promiscuity, marketted to young girls today, imitate infertile women, imitate their habits, destroy your fertility, destroy your youth

A childhood of std’s & yeast infections

Yeah, I’m not even going to try to parse all that.

In any case, as Rmaxd argues, these “infertile” ladies somehow still manage to pop out a few kids when they’re young, and the evil welfare state rewards them for it:

It’s essentially birth control by sponsoring infertile women, most women have a couple of kids, basically enough to live off the welfare & free housing

As we all know, single mothers live lives of untold luxury and indolence.

What we have here is essentially welfare for infertile women, as they’re no longer able to siphon cash from enslaving men into walking wallets & their magical vagina’s a pit of std’s & warts

In the past, you see, women could enslave men by marrying them. Now they can’t get dudes to stick around, so instead they enslave men by not marrying them, raising their kids on their own with the help of welfare money. It’s all very devious.

Rmaxd would prefer that the welfare money go to the fathers:

If we had welfare for men who had kids, with different women, we would have a healthy birth rate, instead of the declining birth rate we have now … this is all about rewarding & protecting a womans sexuality over a mans sexuality

It all leads to what Rmaxd calls:

The new another dark age of female fanatical male hate,

sponsored & policed by the church of radical feminist mangina, & government

The dried up vagina, as a tool of the state & population control

This barely coherent spew of woman-hatred – and it’s even less comprehensible without my edits and annotations – still managed to draw a few upvotes from the regulars, proving that internet misogynists will upvote pretty much anything so long as it contains the requisite level of anti-woman vitriol.

In case you’re feeling especially bored this lazy Sunday, the whole Spearhead thread is a trainwreck of misogyny and racism – including some fairly obnoxious discussions of black “Welfare Queens” and Mexican immigrants from a fellow called Keyster. Does that (fake) name sound familiar? You may know him as a fairly regular contributor to A Voice for Men and the producer of the AVfM internet radio show.

 

Internet Inactivism and the MRA Paradox

MRA in action

As I’ve pointed out before, the vast majority of Men’s Rights Activists aren’t really activists at all, if by “activists” you mean people who occasionally get off their asses and try to engage in political activity in the real world. As I put in in my piece for the Good Men Project on misogyny in the Men’s Rights movement,

Men’s rights activists aren’t much like any other activists I’ve ever run across. For one thing, for supposed activists they are almost completely inactive. Sure, they complain endlessly about things they see as terrible injustices against men. They just don’t do anything about them. While some of those who consider themselves fathers’ rights activists—a slightly different breed from your garden-variety MRAs—try to influence laws and legislatures, MRAs do little more than cultivate their resentments.

MRAs seem to be good at one thing, and one thing only: posting angry comments on websites, whether their own or on those of their many enemies – whether that’s on blogs like this one or in the comments section on various mainstream media sites they consider “misandrist.” (Actually: that’s not entirely fair – on a few occasions, MRAs have been moved to make threatening phone calls as well.) They don’t raise money for anything but their own web sites and their pet projects. They don’t organize demonstrations that involve more than a tiny handful of people.  Like, for example, this one, involving one dude dressed like Batman who climbed up onto a highway sign:

Or this one, which involved a dude dressed up as Batman and a dude dressed up as Robin, climbing up on a bridge.

If your protests typically involve fewer people than, say, the line of people waiting to use the Redbox video rental kiosk outside your local supermarket on a Friday night, I think it’s safe to say that yours is not a mass movement, at least not yet.

Am I being unfair in demanding MRAs actually, literally,get off their asses before I consider them to be activists? Perhaps.

But, as it turns out, MRAs aren’t much good at sitting-on-your-ass activism either. Case in point: For quite some time – weeks? months? — MRA elder Paul Elam has been urging readers of his blog A Voice For Men to sign a petition to disbar a District Attorney he and other MRAs have decided is corrupt. But despite his repeated pleas to his readers to sign the thing, it has not yet garnered the required 1000 signatures, even though at least a few of his readers have talked about signing it more than once. [Edited to add: it has now gotten more than 1000 signaturesd.]

Today, this particular example of internet inactivism prompted Elam to lash out at his non-signing readers. Declaring himself “tired and frustrated” and “sick of this shit,” he once again begged his readers to sign. Then he went a step further, suggesting that he might limit commenting on his site to “activists that are contributing to this site in one way or another” as a way of encouraging activism and discouraging those who are “sucking up air and doing little else.”

I don’t think further exhortation on his part – or limiting the comments there to “real” activists only – is likely to make much difference. [Edited to add: Nagging a few more people to spend two minutes signing an online petition is one thing. Actually transforming them into real activists is another.]  Elam is running up against the inherent paradox of Men’s Rights “activism” – the fact that most of those complaining the most about alleged injustices against men are not in fact interested in changing anything. Their “activism,” as it were, is little more than an excuse to wallow in their own bitterness, and to blame others for their own problems.

If MRAs really cared about domestic violence against men – as opposed to using the issue as a rhetorical weapon against feminists – they would be raising money and devoting their time to actually building shelters, like the (mostly) women who built the first shelters decades ago, and the (mostly) women who keep these shelters going today. If MRAs were really interested in stopping prison rape, instead of simply complaining about it, they’d be donating money to or working with the advocacy group Just Detention or other groups concerned about the treatment of prisoners. If they were really interested in helping those falsely accused of rape or other crimes, they’d be working with The Innocence Project or some other group fighting for the falsely accused or convicted. Or they would be starting real organizations of their own.

But that’s not, at heart, what the MRM is about. For all but a tiny handful of real activists, it’s not about changing the world. It’s about creating a space where men can kvetch and blame and cultivate their own sense of martyrdom. Actually trying to change the real world would involve , well, going out into the real world, a place where their assertions about the alleged oppression of men are seen as the nonsense they are, a place where their bitterness and hatred of women is seen as bitterness and hatred rather than the righteous anger they like to imagine that it is.

When MRAs do venture out of their self-created bubble they tend to either make fools of themselves – like Batman on the highway sign in the video above – or to reveal themselves to be the angry fanatics they are. Elam, for his part, sometimes even has trouble making his case in the relatively sympathetic environment of the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit, and is quickly reduced to sputtering rage when anyone disagrees with him. In the end, sputtering rage seems to be what the MRM is really all about.

>Drama Queen for a Day

>

MRAs: Bigger Drama Queens than Batman
Drama queens: so annoying, but so, so entertaining. Tammy Wynette, singing about failing marriages with that little choked-up quiver in her voice. Chris Crocker, begging us to “leave Britney alone!”  Emo kids whining about whatever it is they’re always whining about. Cats, being cats. 
And, of course, Men’s Rights activists, seriously in the running for  biggest drama queens of all. 
  
Over on A Voice For Men, guest blogger “Tom Snark” recently wrote about a little incident in his life in which he heard the woman who lived next door to him yell at her husband because she didn’t like the way he was trimming some branches.

Not much of a story, you’d think. But Snark, showing considerable ingenuity, stretched it out into a 1200 word post. The woman didn’t just yell; she “yapp[ed] at him like a menopausal Chihuahua.” The man wasn’t just embarrassed to have a neighbor overhear the exchange; he
know[s] that their facade of marital bliss was now forever shattered in my mind. … Is this his terrible secret, hidden from the world: that he is continually disrespected behind closed doors, by the very woman who said to him “I do”? 
Needless to say, Snark answered this question with a resounding “yes.” And then decided that all marriages are like this — ultimately concluding that the women of the world are quite literally nagging their hubbies to death: 
One needlessly stressful incident after another is sure to raise the blood pressure. But actually living with a person who does this, combined with the stress of full-time work five days a week? The origin of the life expectancy gap [between men and women] becomes clear. 
Never mind that married men actually live longer than unmarried men, as approximately two seconds of Googling will show. Snark was just getting going:



marriage has no benefit at all for men. It is not even a stretch to say that, in this day and age, marriage is systematically abusive for men. While women can up and leave at any time they like, with minimal resistance from the law, family courts, or society as a whole (we continue to suffer from Eat, Prey, Love syndrome) – men cannot leave women without paying the price. 
Yes, he did say “prey,” not “pray.” But wait, there’s more: 
Married men are literally trapped, stuck supporting the poisonous predators that will eventually kill them. Plenty of women know this; perhaps this is why they are so keen on the idea. A little legal tweaking was all it took for feminists to remake marriage in their own image: men are now the dehumanised tools for women’s personal use. Sex roles have not simply been reversed, because men continue to do most of the work. What has changed is that the paycheque is now handed directly over to the wife, and his time at home will be spent completing endless ‘honey-do’ lists. 
Oh, the terrible tyranny of the “honey-do” list! Hitler had nothing on these foul shrews and their endless branch-trimming demands!
Now, I don’t mean to make light of verbal abuse. It happens, and it’s real abuse. I once had a neighbor, an elderly Italian man, who was continually yelling at his wife. Most of it was in Italian, so I don’t know exactly what he was saying, but every sentence or two was punctuated by what was evidently his favorite English word, “asshole,” a word he delivered with so much contempt it was chilling. In between these verbal barrages, I could hear his wife softly responding, trying to placate him. I don’t think he physically abused her – he was in a wheelchair – but this verbal abuse was constant. I doubt there was a single day I didn’t hear it. Had I known then what I know now, I would have called the police.
But not every overheard argument is a sign of abuse. Snark has heard one nasty exchange in the ten years he’s lived next to this couple – and he’s concluded from this one data point not only that his neighbor is being abused but that virtually all married men are prisoners to “poisonous predators [who] will eventually kill them.” 
Naturally, the regular commenters on A Voice For Men found this conclusion eminently reasonable. Indeed, in one heavily upvoted comment, Barbarossaaa managed to out-queen Snark’s already impressive drama queenery:

All one has to do is to observe these married men, i mean really look at them… dont let them catch you looking, observe the married man is his natural habitat, and if you look close you can see the dulled eyes of a man simply waiting to die. 

he is the fly caught in the spider web, that has accepted its fate and stopped struggling. he now waits for the black widow to climb down and consume him slowly but surely… 
this is not freedom it’s subtle servitude … you are dancing her dance, she is the initiator you are the reactor, and SHE decides whether you pass or fail she is in complete control. 
Yes, married men are all dead-eyed puppets in the hands of their evil wives. When I read this last bit, I couldn’t help but think of this little scene in Ed Wood’s perplexing bad-movie masterpiece Glen or Glenda, in which Bela Lugosi, himself a drama queen of considerable ability, shouts out “pull the string!” for no apparent reason:

– 
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>Shovel ready

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The Ideal Woman, apparently.

Freud asked: “What do women want?”  Mel Gibson answered the question in that movie in which he could read their lady minds. I never saw it, but I’m guessing based on Gibson’s behavior since making the film that women want lots of drunken anti-Semitic tirades and verbal abuse.

Anyway, over at A Voice For Men, MRA elder Paul Elam doesn’t really give a shit about what women want. But he knows what they deserve, and what they don’t deserve. Which turns out to be shovels and love, respectively. As he explains in a recent comment:

We don’t need to teach young girls to marry for love; we need to put shovels in their hands and put them to work in ditches, digging their way to self sufficiency. We need to leave them to their own survival devices so that they can learn some humility …

But what we most need to teach young girls is that until there are social pressures established that place firm boundaries and limits on their hypergamous instincts, that they cannot be trusted with love, as women in this culture have been proving for 50 years … .

Keep shoveling, Paul.

If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the “Share This” or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.

*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Godwin’s Law, upside-down and backwards

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Meet Stu. Stu hates feminsts. But he hates manginas even more. You might even say that Stu hates manginas the way Hitler hated Jews. No, I’m not comparing Stu to Hitler. He happily compares himself to Hitler in this comment on A Voice For Men.

Phew, I’m glad you [Paul Elam] said feminist hating is an honorable and viable political act because I certainly hate them. … The real object of my hatred are those that enable these people. The ones that are actively engaged in creating the environment of misandry that we live in now.

For those people, career feminists and manginas, my hatred would be on par to Adolf Hitlers hatred of a super rich gay jew who was raping his arse. Out of these, I hate career manginas the most. There would be no mercy for these arseholes if I could be dictator for a day, they would soon be living what is left of their lives in extreme misery.

Emphasis added. This comment, Hitler and all, got more than three times as many upvotes as downvotes from the assembled mob site’s readers. Of course, Stu’s comment is in response to a post titled “The Scourge of Rape. Yeah, whatever,” which means that these upvoters are people who enjoyed a post titled  “The Scourge of Rape. Yeah, whatever” so much that they stuck around afterwards to compliment the author, so, you know.

This, by contrast, is the sort of comment that gets downvoted on A Voice For Men, and which inspires the post’s author, Paul Elam, to tell the commenterfuck that, and fuck you. Let me say that again. Fuck you.”

EDITED TO ADD: When I posted this piece last night, that second comment had virtually no upvotes; you had to click a link to even see it. I hope at least a few of the upvotes it now has were from the regulars on that site.

Another heartening sign: the critical response Elam’s “Rape … whatever” screed got on the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit. His response to the criticism is rather telling. I’m generally not a fan of the Men’s Rights subreddit, as you might imagine, but there are some decent people who comment there and it is much less hateful than almost all of the other MRA/MGTOW/etc sites I regularly read.

If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the “Share This” or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.

*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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